What needs to be considered when sizing a solution which will utilize HP 3PAR Snapshots?

Snapshot functionality is managed entirely by the array controller internally and does not require additional host-facing ports.

HP 3PAR does not impose a fixed 64K block size requirement for snapshot writes; block management is handled by the array's internal algorithms.

While copy-on-write does generate some additional I/O internally, the primary and critical sizing consideration for snapshots is cache consumption, not planning for generic backend I/O increases.

HP 3PAR Snapshots use a copy-on-write (COW) mechanism that requires additional system cache to stage original data blocks before they are overwritten. Without sufficient cache headroom, the array cannot efficiently service the additional metadata lookups and data redirections that snapshots introduce, leading to performance degradation. Sizing must account for this cache overhead to maintain predictable I/O response times.